I've recently started producing a documentary with a friend. As part of that process I needed a new edit suite at home as I couldn't use my work equipment for the project.

With a limited budget I set out to build the best system I could for running Media Composer and some Adobe tools. What I ended up with was a pretty powerful i7 system for under $2k, including a pair of 22" monitors.

While I haven't pushed it hard yet, it's running very well so far and delivering great performance.

I basically documented the build on my website: EditGeek - Workstation on a Budget

I figured I'd share it here in case anyone is looking to do something similar.

I advise you to look for a refurbished HP Z800 workstation with 2 Xeon cpu's and 16 GB RAM. My experience with SSD is that there is not much of a difference with a regular modern harddisk. Ok, Windows starts up faster but Avid acts about the same. SSD's are expensive so better buy a 3TB, 7200 RPM disk instead and make a separate partition of 200 GB for your OS. Avid works so much more stable on a dual Xeon workstation.

You can find them for about 1500-2000 US Dollar

iedjie:

My experience with SSD is that there is not much of a difference with a regular modern harddisk. Ok, Windows starts up faster but Avid acts about the same. SSD's are expensive so better buy a 3TB, 7200 RPM disk instead and make a separate partition of 200 GB for your OS. Avid works so much more stable on a dual Xeon workstation.

I disagree.  SSDs are cheap and you only need a 120G for OS, Avid and Adobe so the cost is ~$100.  The reboot time I save with an SSD adds to productivity in a big way when ingesting removable HD vision.  Partitions are a mess too - you shouldn't keep media on the same physical drive as the OS for access speed so all those extra TBs are wasted.

Xeons are great for stability but bang for buck the i7 is a great workhorse and very stable - extra money saved on the Xeon could go to better workstation grade mobo, lower latency ram, better PSU (very important imho), and most importantly a quadro video card for stability.  Just my 2 cents.

iedjie:

I advise you to look for a refurbished HP Z800 workstation with 2 Xeon cpu's and 16 GB RAM. My experience with SSD is that there is not much of a difference with a regular modern harddisk. Ok, Windows starts up faster but Avid acts about the same. SSD's are expensive so better buy a 3TB, 7200 RPM disk instead and make a separate partition of 200 GB for your OS. Avid works so much more stable on a dual Xeon workstation.

You can find them for about 1500-2000 US Dollar

I looked at that (and have done similar with XW8200 back in the day). Unfortunately there is no refurbished market in New Zealand, so to buy from the US then adds another $100-200 freight cost, plus I have to pay a further 15% on imports plus processing fees.

Given that support isn't a concern for me, I felt I could get better value in building my own system.

DIYers may want to check out videoguys' DIY blogs. Much more informative than edit geek's. NB even videoguys recommends HP workstations for max reliability. What do you already have? I.e. does the $2k have to cover the cost of workstation, storage, monitor(s), back-ups & software?